The effects of an experimental intensive juvenile probation program on self-reported delinquency and drug use

In the late 1990s Ventura County, California, USA, implemented the South Oxnard Challenge Project (SOCP), designed to provide intensive, multi-agency services to youth on probation. SOCP built their program guided by Clear’s “corrections of place”model, which argued that community corrections could decrease offender risk by focusing on restorative principles rather than on coercion. SOCP was designed as a randomized experiment, comparing youths in the experimental group with those on routine probation. Researchers interviewed youths in both the experimental and control groups 1 year after random assignment. This article reports on self-reported crime and drug use, finding few significant differences across groups. Specifically, we find that SOCP youths were significantly more likely to indicate that they had committed a violent crime generally, although a majority of both groups indicated they had done so. We found that those in SOCP who robbed people also did so significantly more often than did the comparison group. In the control group, youths reported committing homicide significantly more often, but this was a rare event. Among those youths who reported taking part in gang or posse fights, those in the control group did so significantly J Exp Criminol (2007) 3:201–219 DOI 10.1007/s11292-007-9038-9 J. Lane (*) Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of Florida, PO Box 115950, 201 Walker Hall, Gainesville, FL 32611-5950, USA e-mail: jlane@crim.ufl.edu S. Turner Department of Criminology, Law and Society, Center for Evidence-Based Corrections, 2311 Social Ecology II, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92694-7080, USA e-mail: sfturner@uci.edu T. Fain :A. Sehgal RAND, 1776 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138, USA T. Fain e-mail: fain@rand.org A. Sehgal e-mail: ambers@rand.org more often. Finally, youths in the control group were significantly more likely to have used ecstasy on more days during the previous month than were those in the SOCP.